“Doing a little corpse desecrating in your spare time?” Anna asked.
“I was saying good-bye.”
“You couldn’t say good-bye with her parka zipped?”
“I was looking for the cell phone.” Bob rocked back on his heels, and Anna could see the first shock of her appearance wearing off.
“You were looking for the cell phone in the dark,” Anna said.
Menechinn raked her with his eyes, trying to use her nakedness against her. She chose not to notice. She couldn’t help but notice what Mother Nature was doing to her backside. The wind was as a cat-o’-nine-tails against her bare flesh.
“What’s with the light?” was called across the wind. Adam. He had left the sauna and noticed the shop light on. In seconds, he was behind Anna, serving as a windbreak. He retrieved her towel and handed it to her. Anna wrapped it around her body and was surprised what the addition of this paltry protection did for her courage.
“Hey, Bob,” Adam said.
Bob stood and dusted imaginary snow or dust from his coat front. Moving deliberately, he took up his gloves, looked piously down on what had once been his graduate student and moved his lips as if in prayer.
Adam stepped so close, Anna could feel his bare chest against her back. The gesture wasn’t sexual and she wasn’t offended. The body heat was welcome.
Finished, Bob turned to them and, pulling on his gloves, said, “Katherine and I were closer than just teacher and student.”
Anna felt a shiver down her spine and realized it had nothing to do with her nervous system. The muscles in Adam’s chest and abdomen flinched, as if he’d taken a rabbit punch.
“We’re sorry for your loss,” Adam said, his words like splintering wood in Anna’s ear. The cliché, made famous by a thousand TV shows, struck her as thinly veiled mockery, but Bob took it as his due.
“Thank you again, Adam. Ms. Pigeon seemed to think I was practicing cannibalism. Or black magic.” Bob smiled briefly. “It’s okay, Anna. You’ve been through a lot in the past few days. More than the rest of us. You’re excused a bit of overreaction. I’m glad you cared enough for Katherine to be upset.”
“I’m freezing to death,” Anna announced without too great a degree of hyperbole, slithered around Adam and hurried back toward the sauna. The heat of its dry fire had been sucked away. The sense of safety she’d enjoyed in her corner of the womb was gone. What remained was fatigue so deep and cold so sharp, she could scarcely walk. Mostly she wanted to crawl into her sleeping bag and slide into delicious unconsciousness, but, with her reserves burned away, she knew she would never be able to warm herself. If she didn’t take the sauna’s heat to bed with her, she’d be cold all night.
Ridley was the only one still inside. The sauna was cooling as the fire was no longer stoked, but up near the ceiling there was still plenty of heat Anna could store in her bones.
Ridley opened his eyes. His long dark lashes were covered in tiny beads of moisture that rivaled the glitter of a Vegas showgirl, till he sat forward and lost the light.
“What?” he asked with the intuition of a man used to trouble.
Anna told him.
“Jesus!” He leaned back again but the angle was wrong and the magic of the eyes didn’t manifest. “You know he’s here to shut the study down, don’t you?”
“Can he do that with the wolf’s behavior so off?” Paradoxically, now that she was getting warm, she was beginning to shiver.
“He’s an idiot but he can probably do what he wants. Or what he’s told,” Ridley said. “He wouldn’t know one end of the wolf from the other if it bit him on the rump.”
Rump.
Anna’s brain caught at the word, a nice, round friendly word. Paul said things like that, his language never degenerating into cursing or obscenity. One day, she would have to clean up her vocabulary…
“Adam must have been out of his mind.”
“Out of his mind,” Anna echoed. She had no idea what Ridley referred to and no energy to pursue it.
“Seemed to think he was God’s gift to science. Some of the people on the list were real scientists. None of them were any good – government hacks – but at least they’d seen a microscope at one time in their lives.”
Ridley wasn’t really talking to her; he simply needed her there that he wouldn’t be crazy enough to be talking to himself. Anna lay down on the top bench and stretched out; something there’d not been room to do before.
“Bob’s your basic prostitute; he screws whoever the man with the paycheck tells him to screw. Homeland Security wants the border parks open year-round. Bingo! Bob discovers the longest-running, most highly respected and – get this – popular study in the country is a piece of garbage.”
That was the last sentence Anna heard. Vaguely she was aware of Ridley shaking her awake, of walking back through the snow with his arm around her shoulders, of sliding into her sleeping bag and – in the morning, she wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined this part – of Jonah saying: “Good night, sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
SHE WOULD HAVE LOVED to sleep the clock around, if for no other reason than, in her dreams, she didn’t have roommates, she had a husband. Nonetheless, twelve hours was sufficient for knitting up the raveled sleeve. At ten-fourteen, she awoke, tiptoed from the room, lest she waken Robin, and wandered into the common room. Where the harness had pulled across her shoulders was aching and the backs of her calves were stiff and painful. Other than that, she was in surprisingly good shape.
A fire was burning in the stove, as it was every morning. Anna suspected elves, wanting tiny mukluks, till she found out Jonah got up at five every morning to check the weather, built up the fire, then, if there wasn’t going to be any flying that day, crawled back into his sleeping bag to emerge a couple hours later with the rest of them.
The common room was uninhabited. She could hear men’s voices in the kitchen. Her parka was on the drying rack by the stove, as were the felt liners of her boots. Salvaging her gear, she dressed and slipped out the front door. The sky was still at the level of the treetops and the wind from the northwest was bitter cold, but it hadn’t the fury of the previous night. Temperature too low for proper snow; flakes, tiny almost to invisibility, drifted sharp as shards of glass in the air.
Gray light, a world without three of the primary colors, clothes that swaddled and bundled out of doors, bodies and smells that swaddled and bundled indoors: winter wrapped a web around Anna. Without the rising of the sun and the rotation of the stars, time had taken her prisoner, and everything seemed endless, as if she’d done it a thousand times before and, like Sisyphus, was doomed to go on doing it for all eternity.
Pushing through new drifts between the outhouse and the sauna, she wondered how the prisoners sent to work camps in Siberia survived. She had warmth, good clothing, plenty to eat, a place to sleep – Winter Study was not a place of privation; it was a place of simplicity. Yet the suffocating timelessness disoriented her all the same. She reminded herself never to do anything to annoy the Kremlin.
The door to the carpenter’s shop was closed. Fresh tracks marked up the snow. Great big tracks: Bob.
She opened the door and remnants of the stench she’d thought she’d dreamed were there to greet her. Katherine’s body hadn’t been put back into the garbage bags; they were smoothed neatly over her where she lay in the Sked. The severed foot was wrapped in plastic the way it had come from the scene. Bob had not seen fit to expose it in his worshipful frenzy. The hollowed-out remains of the wolf and its bagged organs were on the table in the center of the room.
The story of the wolf who had invited Katherine to go with him into the snowy woods came back to Anna. The wistful look of longing as Katherine told the story of the meeting. The final scene from Wuthering Heights, the version starring Laurence Olivier, unfolded in Anna’s mind: Heathcliff and Cathy walking together into a snowy distance. In Anna’s version, Heathcliff was played by a wolf.
Shaking the vision off, she lifted the bags off the body. For reasons known only to wolves – perhaps the way Katherine had wedged herself beneath a downed cedar before she died – but for one gash on her forehead her face was largely unmarked, yet it was not pretty in death. Freezing temperatures and rigor had set it in a mask of agony, a scream sculpted in flesh. The parka had been zipped.
Bob had returned early this morning and tidied things up. Or finished what had been interrupted the previous night, then covered his tracks.
Anna unzipped it, then sat back on her heels.
Looking for a cell phone.
What a crock.
Cell phones didn’t work on the island. There wasn’t a tower within hitting distance. Cell phones hadn’t existed when Anna was a ranger on ISRO, but now the fact they didn’t work would be a huge plus in her opinion. No hikers or boaters chattering away with their pals in the office while the glory that was Isle Royale rolled by them unnoticed.
Bob was looking for something, though. He’d been searching for it at the scene while the rest of them were packaging the remains. He’d left them, speeding off with the flashlight, because he’d found whatever it was and wanted to hide it before they returned, he’d not found it and wanted to search Katherine’s room or he was a lazy piece of shit and decided it was “wine time.”
He might have been searching the body as he’d said. If he’d had a flashlight with him, it hadn’t been on when Anna arrived in all her naked glory, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t used it earlier.
Staring at the dead woman’s face but without seeing it, Anna put herself back in the sauna and retraced her steps to the carpenter’s shop. Memories of the night before weren’t sharp. There’d been too many things dulling her brain.
She left the sauna. She flew with the wind. She heard a clanking sound – probably the Sked banging into the metal legs of the workbench under the window. She opened the door and turned on the overhead light.
Without the wind raking her back and Bob’s eyes her front, Anna was able to see more clearly in memory than she had at the time. Bob Menechinn had been on his knees. His butt had been in the air and his head down, hiding that of the corpse. That’s why Anna had the sudden thought he was eating it.
The time for rescue breathing was long past. Had he been kissing Katherine? Love lost and good-bye and rest in peace with Baby Jesus, like Bob claimed?
Or did he like making love to dead women?
That was a gruesome thought. Though, should Anna ever have to have sex with the likes of Menechinn, it would be preferable to be dead at the time.
Shuddering out of that mental place, Anna turned her attention to cause of death. Wolf, certainly, but wolves weren’t what had taken Katherine to the cedar swamp in the first place, nor, did Anna believe, had they taken the researcher down. The tracks at the scene, those that hadn’t been totally obscured by snow, told the tale of a meal, not a hunt.
Anna got a pair of latex gloves from the box Ridley had left on the counter from the wolf necropsy and turned back the stiffened edge of the shredded trouser leg. A splintered femur thrust through the tattered flesh – broken, snapped, not gnawed through. A considerate beast of some sort had licked the bone clean.
Katherine had probably stepped in one of the swamp’s natural traps and broken her ankle. Maybe the pack was hounding her, but it seemed more likely she’d broken her ankle and the pack had come upon her. Wolves could have smelled the blood from the compound fracture. There were vials of the dead wolf’s blood in her pocket. She might have smashed them against a stone or the bole of a downed tree.
If they were in the area, the wolves would have smelled it. But wolves smelled blood all the time: crippled moose, injured pack members. Every meal was served up with the smell of blood. All summer long, they smelled the blood of tourists, scraping and blistering and cutting themselves with cooking utensils. It wasn’t like chumming in shark-infested waters; at the scent of blood, wolves didn’t go into a feeding frenzy. The odor of humans was enough to send them running.
The only thing that made much sense was a confluence of events: Katherine breaks her leg, wolves come upon her, she reeks of fresh blood – hers and theirs – and they kill her.
Reeks.
The breath of the windigo.
Smell, the most primitive of the senses, flooded Anna but brought with it no memory, only the knowledge that something was unutterably wrong.